David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and university instructor in the disciplines of English and creative writing. His novel Infinite Jest (1996) was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.[1] His last novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012.

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David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to Sally Jean Wallace (née Foster) and James Donald Wallace, and was raised in Champaign, Illinois,[9] along with his younger sister, Amy Wallace-Havens.[10] His father is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His mother was a professor of English at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, which recognized her work with a "Professor of the Year" award in 1996. When Wallace was in fourth grade, the family moved to nearby Urbana, where he attended Yankee Ridge Elementary School and Urbana High School.

As an adolescent, he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, an experience he wrote about in the essay "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", originally published in Harper's Magazine as "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes". Although his parents were atheists, Wallace twice attempted to join the Roman Catholic Church, but "flunk[ed] the period of inquiry"; he later attended a Mennonite church.[11][12][13]

Wallace attended Amherst College, his father's alma mater, where he majored in English and philosophy, and graduated summa cum laude in 1985. Among other extracurricular activities, he participated in glee club; his sister recalls that "David had a lovely singing voice".[10] In studying philosophy, Wallace pursued modal logic and mathematics, and presented a senior thesis in philosophy and modal logic[14] that was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize and posthumously published as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will (2011).[15]

By the time he graduated, with his honors thesis in English becoming the manuscript of his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987),[16] Wallace had committed to being a writer. He told David Lipsky: "Writing [The Broom of the System], I felt like I was using ninety-seven percent of me, whereas philosophy was using fifty percent." Wallace completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987. He then moved to Massachusetts to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but soon left the program.

Wallace's biographer D.T. Max wrote in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012), of Wallace's romantic obsession with the writer Mary Karr in the early 1990s, which resulted in his tattooing her name on his body.[17] He also considered killing her husband.[18] Wallace and Karr later had a tumultuous relationship, during which, Karr has said, Wallace once threw a coffee table at her, and another time tried to push her out of a moving car.[17][18] In 2002, Wallace met the painter Karen L. Green, whom he married on December 27, 2004.[18][19][20]

Wallace struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal tendencies, with recurrent psychological depression and commitments to psychiatric wards, and stalking a woman of whom he was enamored.[21]

Dogs were important to him,[22][20] and he spoke of opening a shelter for stray canines.[22] According to his friend Jonathan Franzen, Wallace "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them."[20]

In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1991, and submitted a draft to his editor in December 1993. After the publication of excerpts throughout 1995, the book was published in 1996.

Wallace delivered the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech was published as a book, This Is Water, in 2009.[25] In May 2013, parts of the speech were used in a popular online video, also titled "This Is Water".[26]

Bonnie Nadell was Wallace's literary agent during his entire career.[27] Michael Pietsch was his editor on Infinite Jest.[28]

In March 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced that it would publish the manuscript of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, which Wallace had been working on before his death. The Pale King was pieced together by Pietsch from pages and notes Wallace left behind.[29][30]Several excerpts were published in The New Yorker and other magazines. The Pale King was published on April 15, 2011, and received generally positive reviews.[31]

Wallace wanted to progress beyond the irony and metafiction associated with postmodernism; in the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (1993),[32] he proposed that television has an ironic influence on fiction, and urges literary authors to eschew TV's shallow rebelliousness: "I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems." Wallace used many forms of irony, but tended to focus on individual persons' continued longing for earnest, un-self-conscious experience and communication in a media-saturated society.[33]

Wallace's fiction combines narrative modes and authorial voices that incorporate jargon and invented vocabulary, such as self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long, multi-clause sentences, and an extensive use of explanatory endnotes and footnotes, as in Infinite Jest and the story "Octet" (collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) and most of his non-fiction after 1996. In a 1997 interview on Charlie Rose, Wallace said that the notes were to disrupt the linear narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the narrative structure, and that he could have jumbled the sentences "but then no one would read it".[34]

Max has described Wallace's work as an "unusual mixture of the cerebral and the hot-blooded",[35] often featuring multiple protagonists and spanning different locations in a single work. His writing comments on the fragmentation of thought,[36] the relationship between happiness and boredom, and the psychological tension between the beauty and hideousness of the human body.[37] According to Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being", and he said he wanted to write "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that could help the reader "become less alone inside".[38] In his Kenyon College commencement address, Wallace described the human condition as daily crises and chronic disillusionment and warned against succumbing to solipsism,[39] invoking the existential values of compassion and mindfulness:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. . . . The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. . . . The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.[40]

Some writers have found parts of Wallace's nonfiction implausible. Franzen has said that he believes Wallace made up dialogue and incidents: "those things didn't actually happen".[48]John Cook has remarked that "Wallace encounters pitch-perfect characters who speak comedically crystalline lines and place him in hilariously absurd situations...I used both stories [in teaching journalism] as examples of the inescapable temptation to shave, embellish, and invent narratives".[49]

"Partridge", a Season 5 episode of NBC's Parks and Recreation, repeatedly references Infinite Jest, of which the show's co-creator, Michael Schur, is a noted fan. Schur also directed the music video for The Decemberists' "Calamity Song", which depicts the Eschaton game from Infinite Jest.[55]

Twelve of the interviews from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men were adapted into a stage play in 2000, the first theatrical adaptation of Wallace's work. The play, Hideous Men, adapted and directed by Dylan McCullough, premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in August 2000.

Brief Interviews was also adapted by director Marc Caellas as a play, Brief Interviews with Hideous Writers, which premiered at Fundación Tomás Eloy Martinez in Buenos Aires on November 4, 2011.[56]

The short story "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was adapted by composer Eric Moe[57] into a 50-minute operatic piece, to be performed with accompanying video projections.[58] The piece was described as having "subversively inscribed classical music into pop culture".[59]

Infinite Jest was performed once as a stage play by Germany's experimental theater Hebbel am Ufer. The play was staged in various locations throughout Berlin, and the action took place over a 24-hour period.[60]

Wallace's father said that David had suffered from major depressive disorder for more than twenty years and that antidepressant medication had allowed him to be productive.[19] Wallace experienced severe side effects from the medication[20] and in June 2007 stopped taking phenelzine, his primary antidepressant drug, on his doctor's advice.[19] The depression recurred, and he tried other treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy. Eventually he went back on phenelzine but found it ineffective.[20] On September 12, 2008, at age 46, Wallace wrote a two-page suicide note, arranged part of the manuscript for The Pale King and hanged himself from a rafter of his house.[62]

Memorial gatherings were held at Pomona College, Amherst College, the University of Arizona, Illinois State University, and on October 23, 2008, at New York University (NYU). The eulogists at NYU included his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens; his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell; Gerry Howard, editor of his first two books; Colin Harrison, an editor at Harper's Magazine; Michael Pietsch, editor of Infinite Jest and later works; Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine; and the writers Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Mark Costello, Donald Antrim, and Jonathan Franzen.[63][64][65]